CRIMEA MEDAL WITH 4 CLASPS TO J. MANN, GRENADIER GDS.

Jospeh Mann was born in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire in 1828 and attested with the Grenadier Guards on 12 Nov 1849 and is confirmed on the medal roll for the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards as being entitled to all four clasps of his Crimea Medal, further recorded as 'received the Crimean Medal with four clasps for Alma, Balaklava, Inkermann and Sebastopol', discharged on 22 May 1858. The following extract is from the local newspaper at the time:

"Five men belonging to Wootton Bassett, who were in the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards before their corps embarked for the East, were, strange to say, all alive when the last accounts were received. Four of them were at Alma, Balaklava and Inkermann, and in the trenches, and neither was wounded. They also survived the pestilence in Bulgaria, and the fearful winter in the Crimea. Their names were Serj. Matthew Tuck, Joseph Mann, William Chandler, George Blake and Robert Barrett. The fact of the Guards having been so fearfully reduced, and that these men should survive, is remarkable. In a letter to his friends, Tuck says: 'I think that my regiment lost in killed, wounded, and by the climate, 1000 men, but I am happy to say I have not had a scratch from the Russian, when I have had hundreds fall around me.'"